XXXVI - The Super Bowl is played in February for the first time, a
result of the regular season being suspended in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks.

XXXV- The NFL and NFL
Films introduce the first fully produced world feed of the Super Bowl.

XXXIV- 17 dot-com companies buy Super Bowl ads, including Monster.com,
Pets.com and OnMoney.com. Nielsen/NetRatings reports that the buyers see an
average 16% increase in unique visitors to their sites from Super Bowl Sunday
to the next day.

XXXII- NBC’s game broadcast is the network’s last NFL broadcast until a
new deal is signed prior to the 2006 season. “We want to thank you,” Dick
Enberg tells viewers as the network signs off.

XXXI - The first Super Bowl broadcast by Fox is seen in 42 million
homes.

XXX - At the conclusion of the halftime show, singer Diana Ross
departs from the field in a helicopter.

XXIX- The game broadcast
by ABC sees ad rates of more than $1 million per 30-second commercial for the
first time.

XXVIII - NBC becomes the first network to air consecutive Super Bowls
outright.

XXVII- The Rose Bowl in
Pasadena, Calif., hosts the Super Bowl for a fifth time. The game has not
returned to the Los Angeles area since.

XXVI - The league’s NFL Experience interactive area debuts.

XXV - ABC’s coverage of the halftime show featuring New Kids on the
Block is pre-empted for coverage of the Gulf War. The network airs the show
after the game instead.

XXIV - San Francisco 55, Denver 10 … and the only Super Bowl since
Super Bowl V to earn less than a 40.0 household rating.

XXIII - Anheuser-Busch airs six 30-second spots to promote the first Bud
Bowl.

XXII - Doug Williams becomes the first African-American to play
quarterback in the Super Bowl.

XXI - The game is watched live or on tape in 55 foreign countries, and
NBC Radio’s broadcast is heard by a then-record 10.1 million people.

XX-
NBC’s telecast replaces the final episode of M*A*S*H as the most-viewed program
in history, with a worldwide audience of 127 million viewers.

XIX - President Reagan takes his second oath of office before tossing
the coin via satellite from the White House.

XVIII - The Super Bowl ad game changes forever. With ‘1984,’ Apple
introduces the Macintosh and gives viewers a spot later named commercial of the
decade for the 1980s by Advertising Age.

XVII - The Super Bowl caps a postseason that saw the NFL adopt a format
of 16 teams because of the players’ strike that reduced the regular season to
nine games. Eight teams from each conference are seeded 1-8 based on their
regular-season records.

XVI- The first Super Bowl to be played in the North (Pontiac, Mich.)
also becomes the highest-rated game, with a 49.1 rating.

XV-
The Oakland Raiders become the first wild-card team to win a Super Bowl.

XIII - The Super Bowl ends the first regular season that had 16 games,
up from 14, and a postseason that expanded from two rounds to three for each
conference.

XII - The first game held indoors (Louisiana Superdome) also becomes
the first Super Bowl to draw more than 100 million viewers on TV.

XI -
The Disney-produced halftime show features the cast members of the New Mickey
Mouse Club and is the first Super Bowl halftime show to include crowd
participation, with fans waving colored placards on cue.

X -
The Dallas Cowboys become the first wild-card team to play in the Super Bowl.

IX -
The game originally scheduled for the new Louisiana Superdome is played at a
rainy Tulane Stadium due to unfinished construction at the new facility.

VIII - The Super Bowl is played for the first time in a stadium that
is not home to an NFL or AFL team (Rice Stadium in Houston).

VII - The Miami Dolphins complete a perfect, 17-0 season.

VI - Although Tulane Stadium is sold out for the game, CBS’s live telecast is not
shown in the New Orleans area because of NFL blackout rules in place at the
time. This is the last Super Bowl to be blacked out in the TV market in which
the game was played.

V -
The Super Bowl Trophy is renamed the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

IV -
Four-year television contracts are awarded to CBS (NFC games) and NBC (AFC
games), except for Monday night games, with the two dividing rights to the
Super Bowl and Pro Bowl games.

III - The term “Super Bowl” is recognized by the NFL for the first
time, after the first two championship games were known as the AFL-NFL World
Championship Game. Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt coined the term.

II -
The game earns the first $3 million gate in pro football history.

I-
The league championship game airs on both CBS and NBC to a combined 22.5 million
homes.

The Super Bowl long has
been a prime chance for corporate activation, and so it is again this year.
Most companies setting their sites on Tampa, however, are planning far less
than in years past.

Not surprisingly, the
ongoing recession is the most-cited reason for a change of plans, but at least
one marketer said Tampa’s game was facing a challenge even before the economy
soured.

“We knew in March that it
was going to be a light year, having nothing to do with the economy,” said
Brian Gordon, president of Miami Marketing Group, which helps organize events
around the Super Bowl.

Gordon said his company
ordinarily operates four to six Super Bowl-oriented events annually, if not
more, including for clients Victoria’s Secret and Pontiac. This year, he’s
working on two, and he says the host site has something to do with that. He notes
not only the relative lack of luxury accommodations for Tampa proper — visitors
will stay in St. Petersburg or even Orlando
— but also how the city compares with recent and future Super Bowl
hosts.

“Tampa is … sandwiched in
between two very good Super Bowls, from a celebrity and entertainment
standpoint: Phoenix and its proximity to L.A., and 2010 in Miami,” Gordon said.
“We felt there [were] going to be a lot of people on the entertainment side
that would just want to skip it.”

GM won’t advertise during the Super Bowl
broadcast, but will maintain the sponsorship
of the MVP award through its Cadillac brand.

For many league-level
sponsors, the task is finding ways to reduce costs while still being active at
the NFL’s premier event. Among them, General Motors, recently the benefactor of
billions of federal bailout dollars, and Circuit City, which in November filed
for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, both plan to use the Super Bowl again
this year as a targeted way to leverage their brands.

In the case of GM, the
company two years ago had more than 400 courtesy vehicles on the ground to
shuttle VIPs across town during Super Bowl XL in its home city of Detroit. This
year, that number has been scaled back to several dozen, according to GM
spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato.

In addition, the company
in the past has held national dealer meetings at the Super Bowl site. Those
meetings, which already had been scaled back in recent years, are “pretty much
nonexistent this year,” Cusinato said.

“All part of cost
reductions,” she added.

The company is, however,
maintaining with its Cadillac brand its years-long sponsorship of the Super
Bowl MVP award. That sponsorship is part of GM’s larger partnership with the
NFL. “We still see this great opportunity to showcase our products to a large
TV viewing audience,” Cusinato said. “Our affiliation with the NFL and with the
Super Bowl still provides us with a high-profile partnership.”

Similarly, Circuit
City is title sponsoring the Celebrity
Flag Football Challenge on Saturday as an extension of its relationship with
the NFL. Lisa Levine, a spokesperson for SPP Sports, which is organizing the
event, said the outing is still seen as a strong promotion despite the
company’s recent Chapter 11 filing. “For everybody in a hosting city,” she
said, “it enables them to really appreciate what Super Bowl has to offer, since
most of your average consumers will never get to the game.”

Pepsi, in its seventh
season as the official soft drink sponsor of the NFL, plans to host a handful
of events leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, including a pair of concerts on
Thursday and Friday nights featuring musicians such as Rihanna, Enrique
Iglesias and Fall Out Boy. “The NFL is a big hit with our consumers” said Pepsi
spokeswoman Michelle Naughton. “We find it invaluable to be able to use league
marks for our football-themed marketing efforts.”

ESPN The Magazine will
host its biggest event of
the
year (top) in support
of its
“Next” effort, while
DirecTV
will return as
sponsor
of the
Beach Bowl.

NFL media partners ESPN
and DirecTV will be active players around this year’s big game, as well,
hosting events in Tampa similar to what they’ve done at recent Super Bowls.
Both value the on-site presence as a way to leverage their brands, but they
also see it as a way to thank their partners, according to company executives.

ESPN The Magazine, in
support of its “Next” effort, will host its biggest event of the year in Tampa:
a VIP party for corporate sponsors and dignitaries on Friday, and an all-day
free tailgate for fans on Saturday.

“The Super Bowl is the
great secular national holiday,” said Gary Hoenig, ESPN Publishing general
manager and editorial director. “It is essentially the biggest sports
convention you can possibly conceive of. If you’re trying to push the idea that
you are about the future of sports, and if you have this big event celebrating
the athlete you pick as the ‘Next’ athlete, there’s no other place to do it.”

The “Next” event garners
more sponsorship, both in quantity and dollars generated, than any other event
the magazine puts on throughout the year. ESPN this season locked in seven
sponsors for the two-day gala, up from five for the event in Arizona last year.
All told, according to a company spokesperson, the venture is a money-making
effort, with several million dollars in revenue being generated.

Ford, as part of a
greater relationship with ESPN, will leverage its F-150 truck as the presenting
sponsor for the “Next” soirée. “This year, more than any other year, we’re not
going over the top,” said Eric Peterson, Ford Truck communications manager.
“But being at the Super Bowl, and being part of a partnership that gets us
there, makes a ton of sense.”

The third annual DirecTV
Beach Bowl, with live coverage on DirecTV on Saturday, offers the satellite provider
the opportunity to reinforce its Sunday Ticket partnership with the NFL. “The
Super Bowl is the biggest event of the year,” said Jon Gieselman, DirecTV
senior vice president of advertising and public relations. “You’ve got to be a
part of it.”

But as companies continue
to scrutinize their finances, sports inevitably will see the adverse effects of
a thriftier corporate America, even for the Super Bowl.

“I think the game is
going to change, not just with the Super Bowl but with all events,” said Miami Marketing
Group’s Gordon. “If you can’t make people feel like their business objectives
are going to be met, then the money isn’t going to be there just for
hospitality or having their brand associated with a really cool party.”

The Super Bowl is unlike
any other live event. Nobody knows that better than the concessionaires faced
with feeding more than 70,000 people lunch, dinner, and perhaps even a late
breakfast for what has become an all-day buffet for spectators attending the game.

One of the first things
Steve Trotter did after settling into his job as Centerplate’s general manager
at University of Phoenix Stadium was make hotel reservations for 45 company
chefs and front-house managers supporting its food operation at the 2008 Super
Bowl in Glendale, Ariz.

Trotter,
a veteran of four Super Bowls, knew he had to make those calls, as well as book
rental cars for those Centerplate officials, 2 1/2 years before the Super Bowl
— a time that was even months before the stadium opened for the Arizona Cardinals.

Indeed, that’s the
enormous stretch of lead time it now takes for food providers to get ready for
the Super Bowl, said Joe Glynn, Aramark’s director of operations at Reliant
Stadium in Houston, site of the 2004 contest.

“I was in on the early
stages of planning [the facility], and it was geared toward the Super Bowl:
what it would take with points-of-sale and the appropriate amount of stock,”
Glynn said. “[The Super Bowl] is basically 2 1/2 games, with all the commercial
breaks. People come early, and it’s a very long event.”

Stadiums stock 2 1/2 to three times as
much
as they would for a regular game.

The food per caps reflect
the daylong food fest, where gates open four hours before kickoff compared with
two hours before a regular-season game. This year, it’s Levy Restaurants, the
concessions firm at Raymond James Stadium, that will be serving Super Bowl
patrons.

Levy has operated stadium
concessions for three Super Bowls previously, most recently in 2006, at Ford
Field in Detroit. In Tampa, the concessionaire plans to deploy 24 executive
chefs from around the country in addition to 150 line cooks, prep cooks and
other kitchen staff. Approximately 2,900 nonprofit and part-time workers will
be employed for the effort, company officials said.

For the 2007 game, Boston
Culinary Group reported a $78.50 per cap despite a steady rain at Dolphin
Stadium in Miami. Revenue from suites, club seats and concessions exceeded $4.4
million, while game-day catering added another $1.2 million.

By
comparison, the per cap for a regular-season NFL game can range from the high
teens to $20, said Sal Ferrulo, Boston Culinary Group’s senior vice president.
“That number gives you an idea of the magnitude of the Super Bowl,” Ferrulo
said.

The sales totals also
reflect variable pricing, where beers and hot dogs are priced a few dollars
more than during the regular season — as approved by the NFL — and spending is
heavier in the premium areas, where the corporate crowd is entertaining its
best customers.

For concessionaires, the
preparations for Super Bowl Sunday have especially increased in scope since the
2001 terrorist attacks, which changed the rules forever for how the NFL gears
up for the game.

All food service workers face a background
check before they are allowed on site.

For
example, food service firms have to comply with background checks for all their
Super Bowl workers, a number that ballooned from 1,200 part-timers for a
Dolphins game to 3,500 for the NFL title game, Ferrulo said. Individuals must
submit their applications by the first week of January, and there are always
some who do not clear those checks and are turned down for temporary
employment, he said.

As for having enough
product on hand, the events of 9/11 ushered in a new policy for ordering
supplies.

“You’re forecasting for 2
1/2 to three times a normal sold-out game, and if it’s not on the property [by
kickoff], you’re not getting it,” Glynn said. “Before, you may have been able
to run a beer truck in the gates during the game, and people looked the other way.
Now, with FBI checks and lockdowns … everything has to be ordered weeks, months
in advance. You can’t call your local Bud distributor and have him send
somebody over.”

The pressure to perform a
flawless food operation increases in the premium areas. To make it easier for
those corporate clients and the food providers, concessionaires now routinely
provide three-course meals for Super Bowl skybox patrons, compared with a la
carte options during the regular season.

“Every suite has the
company’s CEO and No. 1 client, so we took the approach that ‘Here’s three
great packages, all-inclusive,’ so they don’t have to worry about re-ordering,”
Glynn said.

The easiest way to make
sure everybody in the stadium is happy and well-fed is to keep it simple,
provide enough points of sale with permanent stands and portable units, and
“flood the bowl with hawkers and vendors” so fans don’t miss a play, Glynn
said.

“We don’t change who we
are as a company,” he said. “Nobody’s leaving early to beat traffic. There’s no
falloff: 72,500 have tickets, and 72,500 are coming. People spend. It’s a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so their thinking is ‘Let’s enjoy ourselves and
splurge.’ ”

The Super Bowl
comes to Tampa this week, returning to the Florida city for the first time
since 2001. Over the past 10 years, nine cities have hosted the event, and
Dallas and Indianapolis are in line to join that list. Where the Super Bowl
goes in the years after that, and how the league comes to those decisions, is
as difficult a question for teams and their cities to answer as it’s ever been.

The chairman of South Florida’s Super Bowl
committee is all Miami: born there, raised there and educated there. Before
rising into rarefied air as a real estate developer with deep political ties,
he worked as a city of Miami cop. His first Super Bowl was the one he sneaked
into at the Orange Bowl as a rough-and-tumble kid.

Getting ready for the Super Bowl involves
work
at and around Raymond James
Stadium,
on Tampa’s streets, and in its hotels.

You
never will convince Rodney Barreto that there is a better place to hold the
Super Bowl than Miami, any more than you could convince Joe DiMaggio that there
was a prettier girl than Marilyn Monroe.

So
when Barreto headed to Detroit three years ago for a glimpse of what another
Super Bowl host was up to, he came away reminded of the complex dynamics that
go into the bestowal of America’s biggest game.

Super
Bowl beauty is in the eye of the bestower.

“No
disrespect to my friends in Detroit, but, you know, I walked through the snow
to go to their community event,” Barreto said, spitting the word “snow” as if
it were an expletive. “It was terrible, OK? It was terrible. The game was
great. It was controlled-climate; domed stadium. But it’s not South Beach and
it’s not Joe’s Stone Crab, you know what I mean?”

Sure
you do. Everyone does — particularly everyone stuck in an Atlanta hotel that
ran out of food during the ice storm of 2000, or waiting in line to get off a
Jacksonville cruise ship in 2005, or trying unsuccessfully to convince a client
to bring the CEO to Detroit three Februarys ago.

How
the game long associated with South Florida’s beaches, Bourbon Street and the
wonders of sunny Southern California has ended up in Detroit — twice, no less —
and is bound for ice-threatened Dallas in 2011 and Indianapolis in 2012 is
testimony to the incalculable calculus that goes into the selection of the
host.

The
last eight Super Bowls have been played in eight different cities. Tampa, host
of this week’s game, is the first to land the game twice since the turn of the
millennium. That is striking, considering that 25 of the 33 played before that
were held in Southern California (9), South Florida (8) or New Orleans (8), and
that the league never went more than two years without returning to one of
those three familiar destinations.

Frank
Supovitz, the NFL’s senior vice president of events, says that today’s Super
Bowl “can be accommodated, either minimally, or ideally … everywhere where the
NFL currently plays games.”

Detroit’s cold weather makes the city a
challenging place for Super Bowl hospitality.

It
is the “minimally” that worries people like Andrew Judelson, chief marketing
officer at Sports Illustrated, which typically entertains heavily at the Super
Bowl but will pull back this year, citing the sinking economy.

“Given
its scale and importance in the sports business landscape, the Super Bowl is
almost what I’ll call market-proof,” said Judelson, who before joining SI
headed corporate marketing at Sprint and then the NHL. “It can go to Detroit.
But, with all due respect to Detroit, Detroit from an entertainment standpoint
is not South Beach. You are going to have to recalibrate your entertainment.

“All
markets are not created equal.”

That
fact, crossed with the emergence of amped-up facilities across the NFL and the
fade of buildings in some of the gold-standard Super Bowl cities, makes this an
interesting time for America’s largest sporting spectacle.

Los
Angeles and San Diego, two popular host cities, both are off the list of
qualifying venues. The former won’t get the game because there’s no longer an
NFL team there; the latter is out because the league considers the stadium to
be subpar.

New
Orleans is thought to be a strong contender to return as a regular host, but
not until the state of Louisiana works out a lease extension with the Saints.
There’s no telling what will happen beyond that for a stadium with some of the
same shortcomings as San Diego’s.

At
the same time, several cities are running hard to enter a “rotation” that, for
the record, the NFL says has never existed.

South
Florida, which will host the game next year, has its spot locked. Weather
always has favored it — and still does, despite its surprising distinction of
having hosted the only rain-drenched Super Bowl two years ago. South Beach’s
emergence as a world-class destination gave it the second side of the triangle.
A $250 million renovation that added 360,000 square feet of entertaining space
to Dolphin Stadium completed it.

Tampa
Bay, which is hosting its fourth Super Bowl and its second at Raymond James
Stadium, has proved it has the horsepower of a repeat host, albeit with longer
breaks between its shots.

Dolphin Stadium touts the vast space
around the venue, which is ideal for
support attractions and crowd flow.

Dallas
has 2011 and Indianapolis 2012. Both cold-weather cities got the game as
payback for funding new, climate-controlled stadiums.

Three
sites that have hosted multiple Super Bowls — Arizona, New Orleans and South
Florida — are expected to bid on 2013.

Where
the Super Bowl goes after that will go a long way toward clarifying things for
cities that have made large investments predicated on the idea of being more
than a one-and-done host.

“I’ve
said many times now that we are in the Super Bowl business,” said Michael Kennedy,
the chairman of last year’s Arizona host committee. “It’s pretty clear to me
that Miami is in the Super Bowl business. And I think Mr. [Jerry] Jones is
going to try to put Dallas in the Super Bowl business as well.

“A
big part of being in the business is deciding how frequently you want to be in
the business: how often you need it and how often you can handle it.
Unfortunately, you don’t control that. You don’t dial in and say, ‘We want to
be a one-in-five-years city’ or one-in-three-years city. You keep throwing your
hat in the ring, and you hope the owners choose to keep coming back.”

Like
South Florida, which a few years ago proposed that the NFL lock into playing
there every third year, Arizona would like to see a rotation similar to those
of earlier days, so long as it is included. So too, it seems, would North
Texas, which is still two years away from hosting its first Super Bowl.

“The
NFL has changed over the last 20 or 25 years,” said Bill Lively, who earlier
this month began full-time work as president and CEO of the North Texas host
committee. “The nation has changed. Certain cities have changed. And certainly
stadiums have changed. The warm-weather cycle that favored Florida and New
Orleans and California for so long is still a relevant cycle, but the NFL is
looking beyond that for lots of reasons.

“We
see ourselves here in a historic posture … to plan and produce our first-ever
Super Bowl, but to do it in a way that is legacy-oriented. We’d like to be in
this cycle and do this again every three to five years, whatever the cycle is.”

What it takes

The
baseline requirements for hosting a Super Bowl, the bid specs, are
straight-forward. The league says it will consider NFL cities that have:

A 70,000-seat stadium,
or one that can be suitably expanded to that size for the game;

About 19,000 hotel rooms
that will provide three- and four-night minimums, totaling about 90,000 room
nights;

An average daily
temperature of above 50 degrees on the week of the game, or a
climate-controlled stadium; and,

Hotel rooms are prime real
estate during the
event, and
the demand quickly drives
up rates.

GET A ROOM — AND GET
READY TO PAY FOR IT

When a city hosts a Super Bowl, hotel room rates rise signifi cantly in that market. In turn, recent Super Bowl host cities have
seen their total hotel room revenue increase by a double-digit percentage during the month of the game compared with the
year-earlier month.

Letters of support from
all the government entities that will be asked to provide services such as
police, fire and ambulances at no cost to the NFL.

There
are more than 200 pages to the document that outline further specifics, but
most of them can be negotiated up or down, depending on the abilities of the
market. Many cover minutiae, such as the breakdown of workout equipment to be
provided at the practice facilities for the two teams.

“The
[specs] have not changed dramatically in the last three years … in terms of
what is required in order to host the Super Bowl, at minimum,” Supovitz said.
“What has changed dramatically is the amount of enhancements that a stadium,
team or community will add to the minimum-bid specifications in order to
present a competitive proposal.”

Miami
knew that its competition for the 2010 game, Houston and Atlanta, could bring
stout financials to the table. It figured that in order to land the game so
soon after hosting it in 2007, it had to distinguish itself. So it got
creative, offering a series of perks that included the use of a yacht for each
of the 32 owners.

For
this year’s game, Tampa offered all 32 teams free golf.

North
Texas included in its bid $1 million paid directly to the league to cover
game-day costs, and that’s after running laps around all previous hosts in
terms of the number of seats and suites it will provide. Total capacity for the
game will exceed 100,000, and the NFL will get the use of 150 suites.

“Everyone
is out there finding ways to shoulder more and more expenses for the NFL,” said
Michael Kelly, the only person to have headed a Super Bowl host committee in
three different cities: Tampa (2001), Jacksonville (2005) and Miami (2007).
“Paying for more tents at NFL Experience, for more hotels, for more travel for
NFL staff. Everyone is out there trying to find another piece that would be
attractive to the NFL.”

The
South Florida committee expects to put on next year’s game with a budget of $12
million to $15 million. That would put it above the $11 million that Tampa’s
committee will spend this year, but beneath the $17 million that Arizona spent
last year, or the $25 million-plus that Dallas wants to raise for 2011.

In
1995, South Florida hosted the game on less than $5 million.

“And
we fulfilled all our obligations, and everybody was happy,” Barreto said.
“Everything has gone up. At some point, there’s going to be a breaking point in
all this. At what point is that? I don’t know. Somehow, we haven’t seen it
yet.”

The
process is designed to encourage competition.

Each
November, the NFL sends out its bid book, the 200-some pages of specifications
that detail what is expected from cities that want to host the game. Draft bids
are due in April. The league’s event division reviews those, conducts an
initial comparison and then reports back to each bidder to go over shortcomings
and answer questions.

While
the league will tell a city when its plan comes up short compared to others, it
won’t reveal the specifics of other proposals.

“The
NFL is careful about that,” Kelly said. “They don’t say, ‘You have to do this
and you’ll get it.’ They just tell you, ‘This is what somebody has done in the
past,’ or that maybe in their minds you’re a little short on something. And
then they leave it to you to compete. Cities know that if they don’t do
something, somebody else will.”

In
the end, it’s about landing the votes of NFL owners. The analysis may be
objective. The voting is not.

When
Houston bid against Miami and Atlanta for the 2010 game, Texans owner Bob
McNair advised his constituents to structure their bid so that it would be the
most lucrative of the three.

Houston’s
was the first bid eliminated.

Texans owner Bob
McNair
would like
to see the NFL
revamp its selection process
so that fewer cities would
be sent away wondering
where they went wrong.

“You
submit a bid that’s better than anybody else’s, and you still don’t get it,”
McNair said earlier this month, still clearly frustrated by the experience.
“Houston should be there [as a repeat host], but I think when it comes time to
vote, there are other things that enter into it.”

In
2004, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue named McNair to chair a committee to
study the economics of the game and make recommendations in preparation for the
coming round of labor negotiations. Not surprisingly, the debate over the ways
in which teams share revenue became contentious. McNair ruffled feathers. When
Houston came looking for a second Super Bowl, he had few allies at the table.

“I
think that that did play into it,” McNair said. “There were some people that
probably resented my forthrightness. They didn’t agree with me and they sort of
viewed that in a negative way when it came time to vote on the Super Bowl. I
don’t think that’s the way we should conduct our business, but I think that’s
probably what happened.”

That
premise doesn’t surprise anyone who has made a run at the game.

“I’m
a very political animal, so I understand,” said Barreto, who counts a lobbying
firm among his holdings. “Over the years, I believe the NFL has played politics
with its own owners. They reward the ones who are good with the Super Bowl.
They reward owners who are able to parlay their political strength to build a
new stadium. They reward owners who have been good soldiers. … And then, I
gotta believe there’s also their own in-fighting. There are going to be some
who don’t want to see another guy benefit all the time.

“But
put that all aside. At the end of the day, you gotta look at where people want
to go.”

More than a game

While
the NFL’s events staff analyzes all aspects of the bids — from average
temperatures to line-item tallies — the comparison it delivers to the owners
typically looks most closely at the financials of the proposal, the quantity
and quality of the hotels and other venues that will be used throughout the
week, the geographic layout of those venues, and the transportation plans that
will link those sites.

In
recent years, the owners have proved that they’re willing to take chances on
locales that may not be able to check off all the boxes. Jacksonville memorably
created a hotel district from nothing by bringing in cruise ships, a solution
that ended up earning points for creativity, but enough complaints to make it
unlikely that the league will ever bend its lodging requirements quite so
liberally again.

This
year’s host city, Tampa, offers lovely weather, a picturesque bayfront, Gulf
sunsets, great golf and one of the better stadiums in the league. But its
shortcoming is that same worrisome matter of lodging: not enough room at the
inns, or at least the premier ones that are within 20 minutes of the stadium.

The
league has reserved about 20,000 hotel rooms for its executives and teams and
their guests this year. The plurality of those, about 8,700, are in the Orlando
area. About 7,800 are on the Tampa side of the bay. About 3,600 are on the St.
Petersburg/Clearwater side.

While
a visit to Disney will appeal to guests of the league who choose to bring their
families, some wonder whether those visitors will even feel like they’re at the
Super Bowl and whether that divide will rob the event of its massive scope.

“You
could be in Orlando and not even feel like the Super Bowl is going on,”
Judelson said. “That’s an issue when you want to create event bigness.”

The
stadium is a far larger piece of the equation for the NFL than it was a decade
ago. This year, for the third consecutive year, the league will be putting its
NFL Experience interactive showcase on ground adjacent to the stadium. It then
will attach its tailgate party to it on game day, and it likes lots of space
around both of them to make it easier to line people up to clear security on
the way in.

The quality and amenities of stadiums such
as Tampa drive hospitality decisions.

Because
NFL Experience alone takes up about 1 million square feet, a stadium in the
middle of a large, open footprint, such as those in South Florida and Arizona,
generally works best.

“There’s
much more of an organic site plan for Super Bowl than there has been in the
past,” Supovitz said. “The stadium has become much more of an epicenter of
activity and interest.”

But
even that can be adapted when the owners vote to take the game to a place that
can’t accommodate it all in one spot.

In
cold weather cities — such as Detroit and, in the near future, Dallas and
Indianapolis — NFL Experience moves inside, into the local convention center.
That will be within walking distance of the stadium in Indianapolis, but the
stadium and convention center will be in entirely different municipalities when
the game goes to North Texas.

What
the league says it can’t work around is the condition, and level of amenities,
of the stadium.

“If
you’re going to pay certain levels, you want proper leg room, you want a cup
holder, you want luxury access, you want to be able to get in in a reasonable
way, you want a video board that you can see and enjoy,” Kelly said. “And from
a logistical standpoint, there are some that you just flat out can’t do it
right and meet security standards. You just can’t create that much more extra
queuing space to get people into the darned place.

“The
realities of venues like Miami and Dallas and Phoenix: they’re just ideally
suited to an event of that magnitude.”

For
all of that, many who use the game as a means to entertain clients still see
the locale as the priority and the stadium as an incidental piece of the
equation.

When Judelson ran
corporate marketing for Sprint, the staff there used to reach the end of a week
of revelry and joke, “Oh, there’s a game?” Since then, he has headed corporate
marketing for the NHL and served as chief marketing officer for Sports
Illustrated.

“I’m
a huge football fan,” Judelson said, “but the game is an afterthought.”

Judelson
empathizes with the league’s need to place the game in virgin cities to reward
them for funding new stadiums. When he was at the NHL, the league often awarded
its All-Star Game to Sun Belt cities that had built new arenas to attract teams
but still needed all the help they could get to foster interest in the game.

Still,
in the role he plays today as a corporate host, he’d prefer that the league
stick to three tried-and-true markets: South Florida, New Orleans and San
Diego.

“The
[stadium quality] has an immaterial impact on our hospitality decisions,” Judelson
said. “What we want most is a marketplace that knows how to put on a major
event.”

Changes for the process?

The
man who made Super Bowl magic happen in three different corners of Florida is
relieved that he isn’t the one on the hook for the spiraling cost of the games
still to come.

Michael
Kelly says he is sure all the cities will make good on their promises, but he
suspects the pressures to do so in an economy that has gone the way of a
steeply descending punt will be immense.

“The
NFL is cutting staff in New York, and at the same time, it’s making enhanced
requests of the cities,” said Kelly, who parlayed his big-event success into a
more stable job overseeing football for the ACC. “So when does that breaking
point come? You can’t keep getting more from the [host] city because the city
has nowhere to go to get that money either.

“How
much can you ask? It’s becoming harder and harder to get the public resources.
There are so many pressures on local governments. They want to be supportive,
but there are so many other responsibilities that have to be met when you’re
looking at shrinking tax bases. Almost every city you look at is having a major
budget crisis. They’re going to need to pave that road or fix that hospital
before they worry about paying for a Super Bowl.”

PLANTING THE SUPER BOWL FLAG

Tampa
plays host to the Super Bowl for a
fourth time this week. In doing so, it becomes the first city to host the game
twice this decade. With first-time hosts Dallas and
Indianapolis
ahead, the list of cities that
can call themselves a Super Bowl host will continue to get longer — with each
market offering unique characteristics. Following are details for select past
hosts as well as for the ultimate wild card:
New York
.

Tampa
Bay will be the first of the Super Bowl hosts to feel that pinch.

“Companies
in the community have been very supportive, which has put us in a position
where we will be OK,” said Reid Sigmon, executive director of the Tampa Bay
host committee. “But it is absolutely different from what we all thought of
when we started.”

The
timing of the economic tumble worked in Tampa Bay’s favor. The host committee
there sold most of its sponsorships before the credit-market crash. Still, by
the time November rolled around, Sigmon realized it was unlikely that the group
could meet its goal of raising $8 million from sponsorships and hospitality
packages. Its goal was to have sold out by then.

The
committee reconsidered its expenses and decided it could put on a successful
event for $7 million, plus about $4 million from government sources. Sigmon
said he expects to hit that number, though it will be close.

At
least he has warm weather working in his favor.

“If
it were Indianapolis or Detroit [this year] or even next year, people aren’t
going,” said Arizona committee chairman Kennedy. “No slam on Detroit or Indy,
but [the weather] is too handy an excuse in this economy. But the other side of
it is, you have to have that incentive [to build stadiums]. You have to be able
to send the Indianapolis ownership back to town saying ‘Here’s the pot of the
gold at the end of the rainbow for your public investment.’”

Kennedy
said he has no quarrel with that approach but thinks it should be limited to
every fifth year. He’d like to see Arizona included in a rotation — there’s
that word again — for the other four slots.

While
they differ on how frequently they’d like their turn to come up, most of the
prospective hosts would like to see the league return to a more predictable
model than it has followed for the last decade.

McNair
says Houston deserves to be in that mix, but almost as much as he wants the
game, he’d like to see the NFL revamp its selection process so that fewer
cities would be sent away wondering where they went wrong.

“Because
they work on these [bids] for two years,” he said, “they get discouraged and
they start thinking, ‘Why should I put out this much time and effort and money
when I really don’t have a high probability of succeeding. I don’t think that’s
good for the league. I think it creates ill will.”

Instead,
McNair would like the league to pre-qualify a handful of cities as suitable
hosts and then rotate the game among them. Bidding would determine when a city
would host the Super Bowl rather than whether it hosted the game.

“If
Houston is deemed to not be in that category, so be it,” McNair said. “At least
you’d know where you stand.”

For the Super Bowl’s
first 26 years, the game’s halftime show was as routine as a run up the middle.
It was a saccharine combination of marching bands, acts like Up With People and
Disney-themed shows such as “It’s a Small World.”

The Michael Jackson show ushered
in the modern era of on-field
entertainment ad dollars.

Then came 1992. The Fox
network, without NFL rights at the time, challenged the Super Bowl halftime
production with a live episode of its “In Living Color” show. That
counterprogramming, labeled “Doritos Zaptime/In Living Color,” siphoned off
some 20 million viewers from network partner CBS and TV’s most-watched show.

The
NFL knew it was the end of the line for marching bands at Super Bowl halftime.

“It was all about the
spectacle before, something that would fill the field, and at that point, our
competition was really the Orange Bowl [halftime show],” said Jim Steeg, who
ran 26 Super Bowls for the NFL, from 1980 to 2005, before leaving to become
executive vice president and COO of the San Diego Chargers. “After the Fox
thing, we knew we had to do something that really made a difference from an
entertainment standpoint.”

For that next Super Bowl,
the NFL not only got Michael Jackson at the peak of his stardom, but it also
turned the Super Bowl halftime into a sponsorship offering, allowing a sponsor
to attach its name to the extravaganza. It was such an opportunity that
Frito-Lay, the same company that had sponsored Fox’s halftime show the year
before, did a 180 and sponsored the legit Super Bowl halftime for 1993.

This year, Bridgestone will
be sponsoring its second consecutive Super Bowl halftime show. Phil Pacsi, vice
president of marketing for the company, said the sponsorship has already increased
brand awareness and purchase intent and helped steal market share from
competition in those areas.

“If you want to build
brand awareness, this is the place,” said Michael Fluck, Bridgestone brand
marketing manager. “The downside is that you don’t know who the talent is going
to be when you sign and you might get something like a wardrobe malfunction
[referencing Janet Jackson’s infamous 2004 appearance]. But the upside of being
in front of so many eyeballs and being associated with a premium event is very
high.”

Springsteen is the latest veteran
musician
to sign up for the
halftime extravaganza.

NAME IN LIGHTS

A rundown of Super Bowl halftime show sponsors:

Year

Show sponsor

2009

Bridgestone

2008

Bridgestone

2007

Pepsi

2006

Sprint

2005

Ameriquest

2004

AOL

2003

AT&T Wireless

2002

E-Trade

2001

E-Trade

2000

E-Trade

1999

Progressive Auto Insurance

1998

Royal Caribbean

1997

Oscar Mayer

1996

Oscar Mayer

1995

Frito-Lay

1994

Frito-Lay

1993

Frito-Lay

Source: SBJ/SBD archives

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band get their shot in the
Super Bowl halftime slot this year. Here’s how we’d rate the last five acts to
have the stage to themselves, rated on a scale of rank (1 guitar) to rock solid
(4 guitars).

Janet Jackson’s nipple was part of an ensemble in 2004 and
therefore isn’t included.

“There’s only one front
porch on the Super Bowl, and the halftime show is it,” said John Tatum,
co-founder of GSE, whose other NFL sponsor clients include Coors, Motorola and
Frito-Lay. “The key is retail activation, so you can really convert that Super
Bowl connection into sales.”

Pepsi activated with a
sweepstakes offering a jeweled Pepsi can worth $100,000 and Super Bowl tickets
for life. However, as often happens, the winner took a cash equivalent.

As the talent names got
bigger, some inevitable complications arose.

“One of our struggles was
that no one wanted to compete with Michael [Jackson], so it took us a while to
get people to overcome that,” Steeg said. “After that, the most difficult thing
was us trying to top ourselves every year.’’

More recently, the NFL
has been able to attract big names slightly longer in the tooth, like Paul
McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty and, for this year, Bruce Springsteen,
based on the Super Bowl’s ability to push sales of recorded music.

It’s no accident that
Springsteen’s new recording will first be available Super Bowl week.

“We always saw a spike in
record sales, even when it was the person that sang the national anthem,” Steeg
said.

The Super Bowl long ago
become more than just the biggest day in American sports. Super Bowl is now a
catch-all phrase for the biggest days, or even week, in sports, as the parties,
meetings, media attention and revelry that consume the host city each year can
often outstrip the game itself.

“Go to the airport on
Sunday morning and see how many people are leaving,” said Jim Steeg, who
organized the game for the NFL for two decades and now works for the San Diego
Chargers. “It is a convention. Everybody is there.”

By Steeg’s count, 30,000
people come to the host city each year who do not attend the game.

Bob Potter, a sports
filmmaker, was on one such flight home last year from Phoenix. Why? His
meetings with potential sponsors of his films, the likes of Nike and Bacardi,
were done, he said, and working in the sports industry, he has been to enough
sporting events. So, the founder of Bombo Sports took the 7 a.m. Continental
flight home to New York in order to watch the game with his son.

From the beginning, the
Super Bowl host city has been positioned as a destination for fun, relaxation
and a place to do a little business. Steeg said former NFL Commissioner Pete
Rozelle insisted the game occur in warm weather climates and entertainment
capitals like Miami and Los Angeles, and the timing of the game allowed
companies to reward their best employees of the previous year with trips to the
game.

Parties to a certain
extent have always been part of the scene. Rozelle threw the first
Commissioner’s Party in Los Angeles at the Biltmore Hotel for journalists
before the inaugural game in 1967. Sponsors from early on have also thrown
parties around the game. But the emergence of unrelated entities such as
Playboy and Maxim, groups with no deep connection to sports, throwing huge,
seven-figure parties is a more-recent phenomena.

“It is a convention.
Everybody is there.”

JIM STEEGSAN DIEGO CHARGERS

Allen St. John, the
author of “The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Day in
American Sport: Super Bowl Sunday,” traces the emergence of the mega Super Bowl
party to the 2000 game in Atlanta.

Playboy was unveiling a
new Web site at halftime of that game, and as part of the promotion, it held a
party at a local bar. Playboy executives, St. John said, were shocked when the
line snaked around the block to get in.

But it was the 2002 game,
he added, when the parties really took off. That was the year when the Super
Bowl was moved back a week from its original date because of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks disrupting the season. Because of the one-week move, St. John said,
Playboy was able to secure the Anne Rice Mansion in New Orleans, thereby
setting a new standard for the type of venue that houses these events.

Now, tickets on the
secondary market to the parties thrown by the likes of Playboy and Maxim can
fetch more than Super Bowl tickets. Before last year’s game, tickets to Maxim’s
party could be had on ticket-resale sites for as much as $4,000 each, which was
more than what some tickets to the game were costing.

“There are 65,000 people
who get into the game, but there are only 1,200 who get into the exclusive
parties,” St. John said, noting the number of people who can be invited to one
of the giant parties. “I have even heard tales of trades,” he added, meaning
there are fans willing to give up their seat at the game to get into one of the
A-list parties.

Whether that continues
this week, what with the down economy, is a question. Some traditional parties,
including Sports Illustrated’s and Playboy’s, have already been scuttled. CAA
Sports, which had thrown a party the last several years, also canceled its
event. Corporate spending is sure to be down as well (see story, opposite
page), and how many fans of the two teams besiege Tampa will also be a closely
watched indicator for how this week compares.

Nonetheless, many of the
parties will go on simply because, as they have become such big events, they
are budgeted and booked far in advance.

It was 1988 when
Anheuser-Busch first pitched a TV network on the idea of buying four minutes of
advertising in the Super Bowl, along with having alcoholic beverage category
exclusivity.

At the time, Miller
Brewing Co. had postseason NFL rights, so A-B could not even use the words
“Super Bowl” in its ads. The solution: Create its own championship as a way to
leave Budweiser’s mark on America’s biggest sports event.

The Bud Bowl was born.

Anheuser-Busch first made its mark in
the
Super Bowl with the start of Bud Bowl.

SUPER BOWL AD RATES OVERVIEW

NBC is selling at $3 million for a 30-second spot in this year’s Super Bowl broadcast. A
look here at how the ad price has increased through the years.

A-B needed a spot in each
quarter to air the ad creation, which saw helmeted, stop-motion animated
bottles of Bud play football against bottles of Bud Light during the Super Bowl
XXIII broadcast.

“We knew we were leaving
ourselves open for a big price from NBC,” recalls Tony Ponturo, the recently
retired head of A-B’s global media and sports marketing operation, “but of all
the things in my career, creating a position in the Super Bowl is one I’m
proudest of.”

Those first four spots
cost $5 million, together. That’s $1 million less than the asking price for two spots in this year’s game.

For
the record, Bud beat Bud Light that year, 27-24 on a late field goal, but more
importantly for the industry, since then, A-B has not relinquished its position
as the Super Bowl’s biggest advertiser. It holds those exclusive category
rights through 2012.

The Bud Bowl petered out
as a TV ad platform in the mid-1990s, but A-B hung onto its annual practice of
running four to six minutes of new ads in each game. It wasn’t just about
winning ad polls like the USA Today Ad Meter. It was about selling beer: a
monthly lift of 17 percent in the Bud Bowl’s first year and coming in January,
typically a dead sales month.

“We drove a spike in the
January beer business that’s still maintained,” said Bob Lachky, A-B’s chief
creative officer, who’s had a hand in the company’s Super Bowl ads dating to
that first Bud Bowl. “The Super Bowl grew and became a huge event socially, and
we grew with it. You’ve got almost 100 million sets of eyeballs and most are
beer drinkers in a social occasion. It’s just the most natural place for us to
be.”

Brand marketers and their
agencies sweat enormously over producing even one Super Bowl ad because it is
the industry’s biggest showcase. As Lachky notes, it’s also the day “everybody
in America becomes an advertising expert.”

Because A-B traditionally
is a heavy fourth-quarter calendar advertiser, the concepts for the company’s
many Super Bowl ads typically begin to get discussed just after Labor Day.

From the inspirational to the silly,
Anheuser-Busch commercials have
been among the most memorable
spots shown during the Super Bowl.

Mark Gross, senior vice
president and group creative director at A-B agency partner DDB Chicago, says
the process starts with “literally hundreds of scripts.” By November, somewhere
between 12 and 20 scripts have been turned into storyboards. After meetings at
the brewery, a dozen to 15 are selected for production. Most are shot before
Christmas, but spots that don’t use special effects and won’t take as long to
complete can get shot in January.

The week prior to Super
Bowl week, 12 or more of the spots are shown to focus groups at cities in the
Midwest, West and East. There are about 30 people in the room who have
identified themselves as beer drinkers between the ages of 21 and 55. They are
asked to rate the ads on a 1-10 scale.

“If an ad gets an eight,
it is really difficult for them to say it’s not going on the Super Bowl,” Gross said.

Normally, the focus
groups are reliable. “Skydiver,” an ad in which a pilot jumps from a plane,
pursuing a six-pack of Bud Light, won the testing before Super Bowl XXXIX and
subsequently won the USA Today poll. Another ad, in which a band of crabs steal
a cooler of Bud and then genuflect in front of their new master, tested only
OK, but it won the Ad Meter in 2007. Lachky still doesn’t know why.

“It
was good enough to be in the game, but I didn’t think it was terribly funny or
surprising,” he said.

A 1999 ad, “Separated at
Birth,” the tale of two dalmatians from the same litter, got indifferent
ratings from focus groups. After it was tweaked to more clearly show both the
passage of time and more succinctly identify the two dogs, it won the Ad Meter,
something A-B has done for the past 10 years.

Lachky
said the internal approval process is not difficult, although he said working
on the ad in Super Bowl XXXVI where the famed A-B team of Clydesdales paid
homage to 9/11 victims was “gut wrenching.”

Aside from that ad, which
ran just once, lest A-B be seen as capitalizing on the tragedy, one of the
bigger points of discussion comes in deciding where each of the ads gets placed
during the game broadcast.

“It used to be you wanted
to load up in the first half, the first and second quarter,” Lachky said. “But
now, I don’t think that is valid, because there is interest in the game that
stays.”

The ads are usually
delivered to the network four to five days before the game, although Lachky
recalls changing his mind about what to air as late as a day before the Super
Bowl.

DOG-DRIVEN DECADE

Anheuser-Busch has scored the highest-rated Super Bowl ad in USA Todays Ad Meter for 10 consecutive years, starting with a 1999 spot featuring two dalmatians and continuing through last year, with another dalmatian-starring spot.

Year

Description

2008

Dalmatian trains Clydesdale to make beer wagon team.

2007

Crabs worship cooler of beer.

2006

Magic refrigerator hides Bud Light from unwelcome visitors.

2005

When skydiver wont jump for Bud Light, friend and pilot do.

2004

Dog bites man to get him to give up Bud Light.

2003

Zebra reviews instant replay during Clydesdale football game.

2002

Husband slides out bedroom window diving for wifes Bud Light.

2001

Cedric the Entertainers date ruined when Bud Light bottles explode.

2000

Dog imagines chasing a Bud truck but jumps face first into parked van.

1999

Two dalmatians separated at birth are reunited.

Source: SportsBusiness Journal archives

The money A-B has poured
into the networks over the years has bought some influence along with air time.
Ponturo recalls two of what may have been the only instant make-goods in the
history of the game.

At Super Bowl XXVI in
Minnesota, a call to Ponturo from a viewer in Florida told him that a
first-quarter ad broke up. The network didn’t see anything at its end but
granted A-B another ad slot in the third quarter. Later, it was discovered that
a satellite problem had scuttled the ad in 11 percent of the country.

Another year, when Bud
had its name on the blimp hovering over the Super Bowl venue, the obligatory
shot was marred by the blinding sun. After a few phone calls, the blimp got a
second beauty shot, this time with a clearly visible logo.

Exactly what makes an ad
“Super Bowl worthy” is something that the folks behind the creatives will
debate forever.

“You want something that
is new, high on the entertainment scale, funny and perhaps surprising,” Lachky
said.

But doesn’t that sound
like every Bud Light spot?

“A lot of advertisers
that get on the game seem like they are all doing Bud Light ads,” Lachky said.
“The good news for us is, that is our
strategy, but it can be a crowded game when everybody follows the same formula.
There are times I’ve seen [other Super Bowl] ads and said, ‘I don’t know what
the brand is,’ so we try to make sure that doesn’t happen with any of our
creative.”

This year’s crop of A-B
Super Bowl ads is expected to include three spots using the iconic Clydesdales:
one showing a romance with a circus horse, another tracing Clydesdale history,
and a third with a game of fetch. Bud Light will continue its recent
“drinkability” campaign, and expect pushes for two recent launches: Budweiser
American Ale and Bud Light Lime.

“We’re just trying to
show Bud is still a great American brand and nothing has changed,” Lachky said,
referencing A-B’s acquisition last year by Belgium’s InBev.

DDB’s Gross said it’s
about finding a universal concept. His favorite ads are the relatively simple
ones, like “Magic Fridge,” featuring an attempt to hide a stash of Bud Light in
a revolving fridge that “magically’’ appears in an adjacent apartment. He also
noted “Shopping,” where a guy reluctantly shopping with his wife finds refuge
inside a clothes rack with other guys, quaffing Bud Light and watching
football; along with “Satin Sheets,” in which a man is enticed to bed by some
Bud Light. After diving on the sheets, he goes flying out the window, sans
clothes.

“The toughest part in all
of this is finding that one simple, relatable idea,” Gross said. “I’m not the
guy who wants the giant, million-dollar exploding-car chase scene. It’s never
that; it’s ‘What’s the core idea?’

“‘Satin Sheets’ was a
silly spot about a guy flying out the window. … It was just a great visual.
When we finished ‘Magic Fridge,’ I worried about how it looked, but people just
loved the idea. It’s all about putting a new and funny spin on a common truth.”

Two hours before Super
Bowl XXIX, a father and son stepped out of the Florida sunshine and into Joe
Robbie Stadium, hurrying to the souvenir stand closest to the gate.

“What can I get, Dad?’’
pleaded the towheaded 10-year-old.

Clutching tickets in one
hand and grabbing for his wallet with the other, the man told his boy what he
wanted to hear: “Anything you want, son.”

That kind of unbridled
consumerism has helped make the Super Bowl the top merchandise seller among
one-day events, annually bringing $100 million or more at retail and drawing
among the highest per cap rates of any event in America: three to four times
that of a regular-season NFL game.

“Players always say each
round of the playoffs takes it to another level. The same is true from a
merchandising perspective,’’ said Milt Arenson, president and CEO of Facility
Merchandising Inc., which has exclusively sold merchandise at Super Bowl venues
for more than 20 years. FMI also administers merchandising in the host city’s
hotels and distributes the Super Bowl game program. “Going to the Super Bowl is
on every sports fan’s bucket list, so you know people are going to spend. We’ve
done Olympics and World Cup; the Super Bowl is still at the top of the heap.”

Jim Steeg ran 26 Super
Bowls for the NFL, from 1980 to 2005, before leaving to become executive vice
president and chief operating officer of the San Diego Chargers. When asked
about the difference in merchandising for the Super Bowl and any other NFL
game, he offered an example.

The NFL allows the host city
to sell
Super Bowl-logoed
items as early as Aug. 1.

“A team might sell 5,000
programs for a regular-season game,” Steeg said. “For the Super Bowl, we’d sell
around 30,000. I’ve seen guys buy a box of 25 and just pass them down the row.”

As a further point of
comparison, programs at Steeg’s first Super Bowl cost $2.50. At this year’s
game, they will be priced at $25.

The benchmark for Super
Bowl merchandise is $100 million in retail sales, with 50 percent in the host
city and 25 percent in each of the two competing cities. That can vary greatly,
though, as can the ratio of team-specific to championship-market product and
the ratio of hot-market to generic product, based on which teams are playing.
Pittsburgh’s triumph at Detroit in Super Bowl XL was the league’s biggest based
on licensed sales because of the Steelers’ national fan base, the proximity of
their home market to the game site, and the fact that Detroit’s winter weather
boosted sales of outerwear.

“It really makes a
difference if a team has won before,” said Leo Kane, NFL vice president of
licensing and consumer products, who has worked the last 16 Super Bowls. “That
means they’ll have a big fan base and there will be a demand for commemorative
product, which usually lasts well into the next season.”

The scope of Super Bowl
merchandising as it stands today is largely the result of a symbiotic
relationship that draws back 20 years. The Super Bowl, as an event, came of age
at almost the same time as the licensed sports apparel boom of the late 1980s
and early 1990s.

“You had teams like the
Cowboys and 49ers winning it multiple times and creating unprecedented demand,”
said Jim Connelly, who from 1993 until 1998 ran NFL licensing as senior vice
president of consumer products. “All of a sudden, everything was about ‘if-win’
orders, and the difference between winning and losing was tens of millions. So
we got very good at meeting that mushrooming demand with instant
gratification.’’

• Northwest establishes throw blankets as a hot-market item
• Sales records set with first Green Bay Packers title in 29 years

Super Bowl XX (1986)

• Wilson offers football with logos of Super Bowl and participating teams (Chicago, New England)

Source: NFL

Sales
have also been fueled by the addition of new products to the mix each year.
Susan Rothman, NFL consumer products vice president, cited handbags, jewelry
and camisoles as examples for this year’s game.

“Location
and temperature really dictate the product mix,” Rothman said. “We needed very
different product in Detroit than we’ll need in Tampa.”

Steeg
traces the rise of generic Super Bowl product to an aggressive push by the
Super Bowl XVI host committee for the 1982 game in Pontiac, Mich.

“They
were the first host committee with real muscle, and when they started pushing
hard on sales of stuff with host committee marks in Detroit, it showed us the
opportunity,” he said.

Before
the next Super Bowl, generic Super Bowl-licensed products were in airports and
hotel gift shops long before the game. These days, the NFL permits retailers in
the host city to sell generic Super Bowl-logoed items as early as Aug. 1.

While
apparel makes up the majority of Super Bowl licensed products, over the years,
there has been an intriguing variety of offerings. Steeg’s mulch pile of
forgotten Super Bowl licensed merchandise includes playing cards with images of
tickets on the back, inspired by the amount of time he spent “shuffling
tickets.” Also in Steeg’s attic are jigsaw puzzles and forgotten recordings of
halftime marching bands.

This
year, the more than 80 Super Bowl licensees’ hundreds of offerings include car
mats, pewter letter openers, electric trains, pizza cutters, baby booties, rugs
and leather recliners. Playing to the NFL’s assertion that the Super Bowl
trails only Thanksgiving as a food-consumption holiday in America, there’s also
a Super Bowl Crock-Pot from Jarden Corp., cake decorations from DecoPac, and
M&M’s with Super Bowl logos from Mars Direct. Hallmark markets some 40
Super Bowl party products, including invitations, cups, napkins and plates.

It
should be no surprise that Arenson’s favorite Super Bowl was played at the
game’s largest venue, the Rose Bowl, which has hosted the game five times.

Remember
the scene in “Hoosiers” where the coach has his team measure the distance from
the rim down to the floor to show them that the site of the state championship
game is the same as their gym back home? Capturing the merchandising dollars
from the affluent Super Bowl crowd requires the opposite philosophy.

“We
start planning for next year the day after the Super Bowl because every site is
unique,’’ Arenson said. “Nothing out there makes Tampa like Miami, or Miami
like Dallas, or Dallas like Indianapolis. They’re all different, and the key is
to plan and react with that in mind.”

“We’re
not going to significantly break price,” said Seth Winter, NBC’s senior vice
president for ad sales. “I feel strongly that when you’ve done business with 20
of your best partners … [you don’t want to] compromise what you’ve done. That
doesn’t make sense on any number of levels.”

While
$3 million is the cost of doing business, Winter said there are several
opportunities for potential advertisers to get a Super Bowl spot for less,
particularly if advertisers buy in other NBC Sports programming.

“While we’ve been asking
for $3 million, we’ve been asking as loudly, if not louder, for peripheral
investment to give me a reason to write it for less than $3 million,” Winter
said.

Former
Anheuser-Busch sports marketing and media chief Tony Ponturo said Winter will
have to get creative to cut the last couple of deals.

“Seth
and NBC got out of the gates quick with strong unit pricing and fast sales but
ultimately hit the ‘dreaded’ last-eight-to-10-units-left wall in the fourth
quarter [of 2008] and now a tough economy,” Ponturo said. “I know Seth wants to
maintain the integrity of the pricing, so creativity and some packaging with
other inventory may be in order.”

SNAPSHOT: CONSUMER SPENDING

Last years Super Bowl had U.S. consumers spending an estimated $9.5 billion as a direct result of the game, with many of those purchases coming at the grocery store.

Item

Pct. of viewers buying the item specifically because of the game

Food/beverages

67.40%

Team-specific apparel or accessories

6.00%

TV

4.10%

Furniture

1.90%

Note: Information based on more than 8,000 U.S. adults (ages 18+) being asked a series of questions in early January about their Super Bowl plans.Source: National Retail Federation annual survey, conducted by BIGresearch

SNAPSHOT: SUPER BOWL VIEWERS

When you watch the Super Bowl, what is the most important part for you?

The
best category so far, Winter said, has been movie companies. “Without them, I
don’t know where we’d be,” he said.

The
worst? Domestic autos, which for the first time in memory, had not purchased any
time during or around the game as of mid-January.

“There
are certain advertisers that you’d expect year in and year out,” Winter said.
“We’re selling in a marketplace where there are categories and advertisers who
are just not there to support the game. It’s startling, but we continue to move
ahead.”

Getting
good results is important to Winter, who took a big risk earlier this spring
when he set the price of a Super Bowl ad at its highest-ever level.

The
increase was unprecedented, especially considering that for the past several
years, TV ad rates for 30-second Super Bowl spots generally have risen by
$100,000 per year. Last year, Fox wrote business for $2.7 million. Most
observers expected NBC to charge $2.8 million this year.

Predictably,
the ad sales community complained loudly when NBC set its price, but the
network saw a lot of early success with its new, aggressive rate. In September,
coming off a wildly successful Olympics — which brought in more than $1 billion
in advertising — NBC said it had sold 85 percent of its Super Bowl inventory,
leaving just 10 spots available.

John Elway led the Broncos
to a win in the last Super
Bowl
broadcast by NBC.

BROADCAST LEADERBOARD

NBC will broadcast the Super Bowl for the 16th time in the games history this year, but it marks the first Super Bowl broadcast for the nextwork since 1998.

Then
the economy tanked. Winter describes the fourth quarter as a period of
“outright paralysis in the marketplace with certain companies.”

Earlier
this month, NBC said it was 90 percent sold, with seven spots left. That means
the network had filled just three spots since September, and it was planning a
big push to sell the remaining spots in the final weeks before the big game.

“We
left for Beijing with a solid foundation, thinking that we would come back
post-Labor Day and we’d continue to march to this inevitable sellout,” Winter
said. “Obviously, the world changed in September pretty dramatically. The road
to sellout has been littered more greatly than we thought it would be. We continue
to move ahead, but it’s not with the same ease prior to leaving for Beijing.”

Winter
defended his decision to push the $3 million price point.

“If
advertisers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, why would you let
$100,000 get in the way of the most important day of their advertising
calendar?”

The NFL’s clampdown on
massive Super Bowl viewing parties in Las Vegas a few years ago tempered the
atmosphere on the Strip, but the ability to legally gamble on the game
continues to attract crowds.

The league in 2003 sent
cease-and-desist letters to numerous casinos, citing copyright violations over
promotions and large public viewings on television screens of more than 55
inches. Prior to that, casinos would clear out convention halls, put up large
televisions and throw lavish Super Bowl parties. For a $50 entry fee, the typical
party offered all-you-can-eat food and drink to spur wagering in the sports
book.

These days, casinos show
the game on TV screens in restaurants and sports books, but the large-scale
parties are no more. Hotel marketers still entertain guests, but they do so in
a more underground fashion by throwing smaller parties and flying in former
NFLers and other public figures to mingle with key clients in suites.

Two of the larger hotel
properties in Las Vegas declined to comment about their plans this weekend, citing
concerns about attracting the ire of the NFL. Marketers with two other
properties did not return messages.

“We probably shouldn’t be
talking about this considering what happened a few years ago,” said one hotel
employee.

Travel to Las Vegas over
Super Bowl weekend rose incrementally the last few years, topping out at an
estimated 290,000 in 2008, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority,
though hotel occupancy rates for that weekend declined from 95 percent in 2005
to 92 percent in 2007, the last year data was available.

“It’s still a very nice
weekend for us,” said Kris Tibbs, senior research analyst for the visitors
group.

Despite the NFL’s
actions, the Super Bowl remains one of the more popular weekends of the year in
Las Vegas in terms of gambling revenue. Analysts believe Las Vegas casinos
could record up to $100 million in Super Bowl wagers this year.

“The lack of parties
hasn’t affected the amount wagered at all,” said John Avello, executive
director of race and sports operations at Wynn Las Vegas.

Counting total dollars
wagered at the sports books along with table wagering, Super Bowl weekend ranks
with other busy dates like New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July.

“It’s definitely among
the top three or four weekends of the year,” said Frank Streshley, senior
research analyst for the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

On Sunday, Feb. 3, last
year, Kurt William Havelock, a 35-year-old restaurant owner, left the Tempe,
Ariz., condominium he shared with his fiancee, her two children and two dogs,
and drove to a post office half an hour east in Glendale, where he mailed off
eight letters.

Havelock’s plans for that
afternoon had originally included a trip to Desert Ridge Marketplace, a glitzy,
110-acre shopping complex in northeast Phoenix. But sometime that week, he changed
his mind.

The mall would likely be
crowded, with Dave & Buster’s and other restaurants there filled with fans
gearing up for Super Bowl XLII, which would be played that afternoon just a few
minutes down Loop 101.

It wasn’t that Havelock
didn’t want to deal with the crowds. He just wanted a bigger one.

Most of the security labor will be outside
the
stadium, screening people as they arrive.

So he headed the seven
miles south, to University of Phoenix Stadium, the game site for the Giants and
Patriots.

Just a few hours before
kickoff, Havelock pulled into the parking lot of Jobing.com Arena, where a host
of pregame festivities were happening a few hundred yards away from the
stadium.

Armed with an AR-15
assault rifle, six 30-round magazines and 20 loose rounds of ammunition,
Havelock, a man with no criminal record and no history of mental disorder,
surveyed the scene: 100,000 fans, hundreds of security officials.

Not one of them knew that
the letters he had just mailed were addressed to The New York Times, Los
Angeles Times and Associated Press, among others, and that they contained an
eight-page manifesto detailing a planned massacre that he promised would be
“swift, and bloody.”

But after arriving on
site, Havelock changed his mind. He turned himself in to local police a few
hours later.

Law enforcement officials
in Tampa hope the combination of experience and a record-sized security budget
and staff will help prevent the near disaster that occurred last year at
Glendale’s first Super Bowl.

Much has changed for
Super Bowl hosts since the game was last staged in Tampa in 2001. The biggest
change, according to Maj. John Bennett, the Tampa Police Department’s incident
commander for the Super Bowl, is the implementation of “target hardening,”
security industry jargon that describes the perimeter barricades that have
encompassed each of the seven post-9/11 Super Bowl stadium sites.

TAMPA'S SUPER BOWL COSTS

When Super Bowl XLIII was awarded to Tampa in 2005, city officials estimated that the municipalitys net cost to host the game would be about $1 million. The economy has changed drastically since then, but Tampa has managed to keep its expenses roughly within that budget. Following is a breakdown of the citys estimated expenditures for the game, as of Jan. 8, along with outside contributions for certain areas.

$120,000: Beautification/infrastructure upgrades
$70,000: From the Florida Department of Transportation

$56,100: Fire, rescue and emergency services
• $38,500: From the NFL

$780: Code enforcement

NET COST FOR CITY OF TAMPA:

$1,046,680

Source: City of Tampa

Every one of the
estimated 100,000 people who will enter the site this year — from fans to
vendors to the 2,000 people who have volunteered to storm the field when Bruce
Springsteen plays the halftime show — will pass through a magnetometer as they
would at an airport.

What that means, Bennett
said, is that most of the security labor is located outside the stadium itself.
That includes more than 3,000 security personnel, from uniformed guards and
undercover decoys to Coast Guard pilots and Homeland Security officials.

Approximately 300 local
and county officers will be inside the stadium, about the same number as for a
regular-season game, as well as about 20 state highway patrol officers located
on the field. Police and emergency costs for the city will be offset at least
in part by reimbursements coming from the NFL, according to Santiago Corrada,
Tampa’s administrator of neighborhood services and the person who is overseeing
Tampa’s $1 million spending for the effort.

The NFL plans to spend
about $6 million on security for this Sunday’s Super Bowl, according to people
involved with the game. League officials would not comment on that amount. The
game’s security plan was tested earlier this month during the Outback Bowl,
also played at Raymond James Stadium.

The massive operation
will be run out of the joint operating center (JOC), a secure, highly technical
outpost located far from the stadium whose location is not publicly identified.
From there, officials can communicate with the more than a dozen organizations
that are working to protect the area. If the security inside the perimeter is
compromised — “swallowed,” in security terms — action plans will be
orchestrated from the JOC.

The last time the Super
Bowl was in Tampa, in 2001, security also was story line, but for a different
reason. The city and the NFL received criticism from the American Civil
Liberties Union after it was revealed that a face-recognition system had been
used to compare an image of every attendee as they entered the stadium against
a criminal database. City officials said the game was just a test site for the
system and that this time, undercover enforcement will monitor the crowds for
specific behavior.

As Bennett acknowledged,
last year’s potential Super Bowl shooter probably would not have fit anyone’s
profile. He said league and local officials know there’s a limit on how much
scrutiny fans will endure.

“It’s still an event
first and has to have the feel of a game,” he said, “and it’s our job to
maintain that facade.”

The
first Super Bowl I ever covered was the 49ers’ first, Super Bowl XVI, in 1982.
I was very close to the organization, and it was fun watching it up close
because every time the 49ers went to the Super Bowl, they won.

Berman

Super
Bowl XXIV against Denver in New Orleans sticks out. Joe Montana had come under
a bit of scrutiny during the week for something, and he went out and just
destroyed the Broncos’ defense. I’ve never seen him better, and that’s saying
something because it’s Montana. There was one play just before the end of the
half, a touchdown on a post to Jerry Rice, that pretty much put the game away.
Montana gave a fist pump after the touchdown, and you knew they were in the
driver’s seat. They went on to repeat as Super Bowl champs, and Montana became
arguably the best quarterback of all time.

Five years later, the
49ers were back in the Super Bowl in Miami, and it was Steve Young’s time.
Finally, they had beaten Dallas, and there was one more game to get the monkey off
his back. I went to practice on Thursday, and the ball in the hour and a half
never hit the ground. The 49ers were so precise. To see that translate from
practice to the actual game was incredible. Steve threw for six touchdown
passes, ran for 49 yards and the 49ers beat the Chargers 49-26.

Those last few Super
Bowls the 49ers won, their offense was just like a race car, ready to roll and
blow everybody away.

Chris Berman will be
covering his 27th Super Bowl this year.

Bob WolffBroadcaster

Wolff

I
was the lucky guy at the play-by-play mike describing the ultimate in team play when the Baltimore Colts
edged the New York Giants, 23-17, in the National Football League’s first
overtime championship game.

It was more than “the
greatest football game ever played” because of its galvanizing effect on the
NFL. Aided by the national TV and radio coverage, this 1958 thriller sold the
professional game to viewers, listeners and the press as no other game had ever
done. Networks and sponsors were eager to satisfy the new demand. Pro football
had hit the media jackpot. … The college game had dominated the football world,
but in one day, pro football leaped into the national spotlight. The title game
received a more grandiose label (the Super Bowl) as it became the nation’s
most-viewed individual sports event.

Just two years before the
Colts-Giants championship game, Hall of Fame sportscaster Bob Wolff called Don
Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

Larry Weisman
NFL writerUSA Today

I
covered my first Super Bowl 30 years ago. Ah, Miami in the winter. What a
respite from the Northeastern winter. And the teams: the Dallas Cowboys and
Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XIII. This was the Super Bowl at which
Cowboys linebacker Thomas Henderson would say that Terry Bradshaw couldn’t
spell “cat” if you spotted him the “c” and the “a.” The drop in the end zone by
Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith of a sure touchdown pass. Tom Landry on one
sideline, Chuck Noll on the other for another Steelers victory.

But
here is what I remember best: Tickets were $40. This year, they were officially
priced at $1,000 for the first time. At the Orange Bowl, on game day way back
when, I found my seat in the auxiliary press section and prepared to work. Took
out my notebook, binoculars, flip card. When I looked up, I saw a familiar head
bobbing in the row ahead of me, which was the last area of fan seating. It was
one of my co-workers, who had come to Miami to see his family and went to the
game on a whim.

“How
did you get a ticket?”

“Scalper.”

“How
much?”

“$40.”

I
imagine hot dogs were probably only a dollar then.

Jim Saccomano Vice president, public relationsDenver Broncos

The
NFL has a large cadre of PR people to make the media side of it go, and I have
been honored to be a part of that group for 25 years. My story is from Super
Bowl XXV at Tampa in 1991.

The
number of pages of print material handed out to the media is staggering. It’s
basically a palette of paper consumed during the game. All week long, we kept
checking with the fellow in charge of making sure the paper was delivered, and
all week long we were assured it was there.

Then,
early Sunday morning, our PR crew arrived. Guess what? No paper. Not one sheet.
And it’s Sunday. Nobody is open. The Bucs’ PR rep took a van back to his
offices and brought back all the Xerox paper from their building — nowhere near
enough. He then woke up a fellow who owned a small print shop and convinced him
to open up, and the van headed there.

I will
never forget the sight of a cadre of big-time PR executives (us), all wearing
suits, each carrying a box of Xerox paper up the stadium steps and escalators
to the distribution location.

So,
there are a lot of details to putting on a big event, a lot of which seem more
exciting than this, but, don’t forget the paper.

Mark Murphy
PresidentGreen Bay Packers

My
fondest memory from my playing career was Super Bowl XVII at the Rose Bowl in
Pasadena. We had just defeated the Miami Dolphins for the Redskins’ first title
since 1942. My father, Hugh, who passed away this summer, had made his way into
the locker room and was able to be with me. It was a great setting. We were the
world champions, and for Big Murph, as my father was affectionately known, to
be there to experience and share in the exhilaration is a moment I’ll never
forget.

Jimmy Smith
Group creative directorTBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles

My
college basketball career was in a shambles. I had been cut from Michigan
State’s basketball team … again! So my NBA dream was dead. I thought, “What am
I gonna do?!” Then, I was watching the Super Bowl, and this commercial for
Apple ran. At that moment, I instantly knew what the next best thing to working
in the NBA was gonna be. It was to work for whatever ad agency that did that
dope “1984” for Apple. That Super Bowl spot launched my career and my quest.

Stephanie Druley
Senior coordinating producerESPN

My first Super Bowl was January 1997. I
was an associate producer working on features. I was young, naïve and thought
it would be fun. It was hard work then and it’s even tougher now. At that time,
we just did TV: segments on “SportsCenter” and “Countdown.” Now, ESPN has TV,
radio, dot-com, the magazine and other platforms offering coverage all week,
24/7. Planning for this year started
before last season even ended. It’s an incredibly demanding event and equally
as rewarding when it’s all done.

Jon Higgins
Senior partner and CEO, internationalKetchum

Since I live in London and have been a lifelong Giants fan,
my 11-year-old son and I stayed up until 4:30 a.m. watching every blessed play
in last year’s Super Bowl on Sky Sports. It remains the most exciting sporting
contest I have ever seen, including the Giants’ first
Super Bowl win, which I witnessed in person at the Rose Bowl.

Trey Wingo
“NFL Live” hostESPN

The whole thing about getting postgame
interviews at the Super Bowl is they herd you down somewhere in the building
well before the game is over. Halfway through the fourth quarter last year in Arizona, we left the
trailer behind the stadium. I was in a holding pen with hundreds of media
waiting to be released onto the field.

I had to know what was going on, so I
called Mark Schlereth, who was home watching. He gave me the play-by-play as
the Patriots marched down the field and scored the touchdown to take the lead.

The reception was cutting in and out, and
I could peer my head around and kind of see what was
happening on the field. I knew the Giants’ drive came down to a crucial play,
and then they scored, and the Patriots ran out the clock.

I could see Plaxico [Burress] made the
catch for the touchdown, but I couldn’t figure out who made that catch to keep
the drive alive. As soon as we got onto the field, I went straight to Plaxico
and got the first interview with him, thinking, “This
is great. I’ve got the one-on-one with the guy who caught the game-winning
touchdown.”

Five minutes later, we’re walking around,
and about 10 people are surrounding David Tyree, the team’s fourth wide
receiver. I’m getting all these other people — Justin Tuck, Antonio Pierce,
Michael Strahan. Finally, I go back behind the Giants’ locker room later and I
get Archie Manning. It’s not until I talked to him that I finally learned Tyree
made the big catch to keep the drive alive. Had I known that, I would have gone
to him first, but that’s what it’s like trying to cover the Super Bowl in a
game like that.

Gary Belsky
Editor-in-chiefESPN The Magazine

One of the best things about covering the
Super Bowl is the media buffet, and not because of the food. This is the
cavernous room where you routinely get a chance to meet your much-admired
peers: famous writers, legendary reporters, producers you’ve long respected and
on-air talent you grew up watching. And sometimes, the dad of
your favorite player, who’s also a pretty accomplished journalist himself.

This happened to me at the second Super
Bowl I attended, Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005, Jacksonville. I had
just finished loading up my breakfast plate when I spotted Larry Fitzgerald Sr.
Fans in the Twin Cities knew him as a veteran writer, producer, talk-show host
and commentator, most notably as sports editor and columnist for the Minnesota
Spokesman-Recorder.

I knew him that way too, but mostly I
thought of him as the dad of my favorite wide receiver, Larry Fitzgerald Jr.,
who was drafted the prior spring by my favorite football team, thus offering a
beleaguered Cardinals fan some hope for the future.

Turning 15 again, I reacted to seeing
Fitzgerald by losing any sense of professional cool. I immediately sat down
next to the man and spent the next 20 minutes peppering him with a mixture of questions, mostly about his son (Was he always so
sure-handed? How did you raise him to be such a good kid?), but also about his
journalist career (Do you prefer print, radio or TV? What’s it like working for
one of the oldest African-American newspapers in the country?) and even about breakfast (How ’bout them scrambled eggs?
Will you please pass the pepper?).

Fitzgerald answered all my questions. All
in all, he was gracious, although at some point he said something about needing
a bagel and left the table. Every time I saw him for the rest of the weekend,
he turned the other way. Can’t say I blame him.

George Martin
Vice presidentAXA Sports Financial Services

My biggest memory would have to be our
[New York Giants] Super Bowl and the safety against the Denver Broncos and John
Elway back in 1987. That is something that will always be a sense of pride for
me and a great accomplishment — to have done that on the world’s greatest
stage.

George Martin was a defensive tackle for the New York Giants (1975-88). Last fall, he
walked across the
United
States
to raise awareness and funds for 9/11
first responders.

Marv Albert
BroadcasterTNT, Westwood One Radio

Albert

As a
fan, it would have to be the Jets beating the Colts in 1969. I remember
watching the game on NBC. It wasn’t what you could call a great game, but the
magnitude of the win was enormous, Joe Namath and his guarantee of victory,
particularly in a Giants-geared city. … The game was so significant in leading
to the merger.

From a broadcast point of
view, there are two memories. The most exciting play to call was in 2007, when
Devin Hester of the Bears returned the opening kickoff 92 yards for a
touchdown. It was a stunner, and on a rain-soaked field in Miami. It was a
perfect way to start the game. It gets you ready for the rest of the game.

The other game was last
year, when the Giants pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl
history. Put that right alongside the Jets in ’69 in terms of upsets.

Marv Albert will be
calling his seventh Super Bowl this year for Westwood One Radio.

Cowboys-Bills at the Rose
Bowl in 1993: I was producing the halftime show, and Garth Brooks was set to
sing the anthem. He threatened to walk out 20 minutes before the start of the anthem
because the network didn’t play his video during pregame as promised. The NFL
was left without an anthem singer and asked us to find a celebrity in the
stadium who would be willing to sing on 10 minutes notice.

We
found Jon Bon Jovi, who was willing to do it. He came down from his suite,
practiced in the tunnel, and at the last minute Garth Brooks showed up,
realizing he could not possibly walk out on the national anthem with an
audience of over a billion people. Bon Jovi was promised the anthem for the
following Super Bowl.

Clifton Brown
NFL writerThe Sporting News

After
last year’s Super Bowl, I was rushing back from the Giants’ locker room to
write a magazine feature on Eli Manning. I passed a man in the hallway who looked
familiar, but I was in such a hurry to make deadline, I kept right on walking.
I took about 10 more steps before I realized who it was: Archie Manning, Eli’s
father. I did a U-turn, caught up with him, and asked him some questions about
watching another son win a Super Bowl. He could not have been nicer. I walked
away thinking, “Man, is that guy lucky.”

Later,
I started thinking, “I just watched a great Super Bowl in person for free, I
got paid to do it and I accidentally bumped into a source who helped my story.”
Sometimes, when I get stressed about the job, I think about that moment, and it
brings a smile to my face.

Warren SappAnalystNFL Network,
Showtime

My
Super Bowl anecdote was trying to figure out a way to get 50 tickets. I am in
California and my whole family is in Florida, and I am trying to figure out how
to get them all tickets. That was the hardest thing. I have pictures from
Sports Illustrated where I am sitting there counting them out, trying to make
sure I had them all. I counted them every day to make sure my mama’s ticket was
good, my sister’s ticket was good. It was the wildest thing ever, and I didn’t
get them all until the last day. The game was the easiest thing. Those 50
tickets were a nightmare.

Harvey Schiller
PresidentInternational Baseball
Federation

Super
Bowl XXXII in San Diego produced my best personal memory. I was with Sid
Luckman and Al Davis, both hall of famers and fellow Erasmus Hall High School
graduates. Al was my freshman football coach at The Citadel and, of course,
famous for recruiting Paul Maguire, my roommate to Charleston.

Leonard Armato
CEOAVP Pro Beach Volleyball
Tour

Armato

My
favorite Super Bowl memory was the San Francisco 49ers miracle team of 1982
winning it all after finishing near the bottom the year before. Joe Montana and
Dwight Clark led the offense, and Ronnie Lott, who was my first sports client
when I was an agent, was the defensive star in his rookie season.

Evan Kamer
Executive vice presidentFantasy Sports Ventures

Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002
was only the second time the NFL allowed real-time fan votes to influence the
MVP winner. There was a very short window when fans were able to cast their
votes on NFL.com or via mobile phone. The game came down to a last-second, game-winning
kick by Adam Vinatieri. Votes had to be tallied quickly, and the MVP (Tom
Brady) needed to be announced within minutes. But the effort was nothing
compared with what Jim Steeg and the NFL events group were able to pull off
that year, having to move the game back one week because of the 9/11 attacks,
which happened only four months prior.

While the game was one of
the most thrilling and one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, the
most memorable moment was the moving, uplifting and respectful halftime
performance U2 gave, as names of all the 9/11 victims scrolled up a screen
behind Bono as he sang “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

Evan Kamer was senior
director of business development for NFL Digital Media at the time of Super
Bowl XXXVI.

Joe FavoritoStrategic communications and brand
consultant, former head of communications for the New York Knicks, Philadelphia
76ers and USTA

I have three Super Bowl
memories, more for the locale from where I witnessed them.

The first was seeing
Kevin Dyson stopped at the end of Super Bowl XXXIV. I watched on a 12-inch
screen in an empty bar at the Johannesburg airport on the way to Davis Cup in
Zimbabwe.

The second was seeing
Denver defeat Green Bay in the early-morning hours amongst a half-dozen
cheeseheads at the Melbourne Casino during the Australian Open.

The third was watching
the Cowboys beat the Broncos in Super Bowl XII from the emergency room of Long
Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, where I had gone to get my hand X-rayed after
chipping a bone in my thumb during a pre-Super Bowl touch football game in
front of my grandparents’ house.

Trent Dilfer
NFL analystESPN

The biggest challenge was the emotions:
going back to the stadium where I had played so long and now [was] in Super
Bowl XXXV, the biggest game of my life. Everything I did that week was to
mentally and emotionally prepare myself to not get caught up in the moment when
I walked onto the field. I soaked in the environment and the grandeur of the
Super Bowl, but was calm and as flat-lined as I had ever been before a game.

When the game kicked off, I didn’t have
enough emotion to play the game or any rhythm, and I played poorly. Our
fullback, Sam Gash, came over to me in the huddle when we were in a TV timeout.
He grabbed me by the chest-plate of my pads, shook me and said, “You need to
get your emotions up. You are the emotional leader of this team.”

Boy, did it wake me up. A few plays later,
I threw a touchdown pass to Brandon Stokely, and the rest of the way, I played
my game, and we won.

Trent Dilfer led the Baltimore Ravens to the Super Bowl XXXV title
in Tampa in 2001, the year after he left the Buccaneers, for whom he played his
first six NFL seasons.

Jay Harris
“SportsCenter” anchorESPN

I was working in Pittsburgh doing national radio news when the
Cowboys met the Steelers in Super Bowl XXX. A buddy of mine and I wore our
Cowboys jerseys to the Black and Gold party at work that Friday before the
game. We were booed and joked [at] mercilessly. You may remember the Cowboys
won the game. My buddy and I wore our jerseys to work that Monday … grinning.
People didn’t talk to us for a long time.

Mike Greenberg
Show hostESPN Radio

They say you never forget your first, and
I certainly never will. My first Super Bowl: 1993 in the Rose Bowl, watching
the sun set in the distance as Garth Brooks sang the national anthem and the
military planes flew overhead in formation. Then, the Cowboys shellacked the
Bills 52-17. I have had the privilege of covering 12 Super Bowls since.

Scott Van Pelt
Anchor, show hostESPN TV and radio

As a fan, the moment that stands out is
John Riggins’ run on fourth down against the Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII in
1983. As a Redskins fan, I was fortunate enough to see them win three Super
Bowls. But the first time your team wins, it is unlike any other because you
wonder if it’s even possible. Also, as a teenager, I suppose I was far less
cynical about all of it.

Dennis Dillon
Staff writerThe Sporting News

The first Super Bowl I covered was XV, in
1981, between the Raiders and Eagles in New
Orleans. I was a beat writer for the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat and had to write two pieces: a “running” story during the game
and a feature on Raiders linebacker Rod Martin, who had three interceptions,
after the game.

When they passed out sack lunches at
halftime, I was busy writing. I put it under my seat, thinking I would eat it
after I was finished working. When I returned to my hotel room that night, I
was famished. I couldn’t wait to bite into my sandwich. Imagine my surprise
when I opened my sack lunch: My Globe-Democrat colleague columnist Bob Burnes
had inadvertently put the unsmoked half of his cigar in my bag.

The Sporting News is owned by American City
Business Journals, parent company of SportsBusiness Journal.

Note: Arizona data for Phoenix MSA. Cardinals debuted in Chicago and later played in St. Louis before moving to Arizona in 1988.
Research by Brandon McClungSources: U.S. Census Bureau, Fortune Global 500, RealtyTrac.com, SBJ/SBD archives

The
Super Bowl returns to an urban setting this year after a two-year absence from
such sites, and that means Jerry Anderson’s job gets a bit tougher putting all
the pieces together for North America’s biggest one-day sporting event.

Anderson,
a senior principal at HOK Sport, has served as the NFL’s chief consultant for
setting up the Super Bowl campus and supporting compound since the 1985 game at
Stanford Stadium in California. His partner in the effort, builder Noel Lesley,
has been by Anderson’s side since the beginning.

Anderson

“Super
Bowl XIX,” Anderson recalls. “It was supposed to be a small remodel job, but I
spent a year and a half with stadium planning, and it turned into game-day
operations.”

This
is the fourth Super Bowl in Tampa and the third one Anderson has worked on in
the city during his 25 years preparing sites for the big game. It is Tampa’s
first Super Bowl since the 2001 terrorist attacks, though, and there have been
significant adjustments for the seven games played since that time.

Starting
with the 2002 game, game-day operations have centered on a secure perimeter
installed at a minimum of 300 feet from the stadium entrances, created by
putting eight-foot fences and concrete barriers around the facility. Crews work
throughout the night before the Super Bowl to set up what amounts to a massive
fence line surrounding the stadium, something that can be tricky in an urban
environment. Before entering the perimeter, everybody, including security
employees arriving on the job, must walk through tents where crowd managers pat
them down and use magnetometers to check for weapons.

The
last two Super Bowls, in suburbs of Phoenix and Miami, were held at stadiums
surrounded by parking lots. That provided ample space for officials to set up
shop for the game, the 1.1 million-square-foot NFL Experience and the
350,000-square-foot NFL Tailgate Party for VIPs.

Two
years ago was the first time NFL Experience became part of the Super Bowl site,
marking another big change from the last time Tampa played host. Before the
2007 game, the massive interactive attraction was held in the host market’s
convention center. With the change, for this year’s Super Bowl, the secure
perimeter will extend about 1,000 feet at its farthest from the stadium.

NBC will house its game-day set in the
iconic pirate ship at Raymond James Stadium.

“The big difference was
the last one in Tampa was prior to 9/11,” Anderson said. “It’s a challenging
site because of major roads on the east and west sides of the stadium. We have
been very careful planning access with the police department and DOT.”

Those
major thoroughfares and secondary roads to the north and south frame a skinny
footprint compared with the Super Bowl sites of the past two years, forcing
officials to create new pathways for fans making their way to the stadium, said
Frank Supovitz, the NFL’s senior vice president of events.

That’s
especially true for Super Bowl ticket holders heading from north of the stadium
in the hours before the game, Supovitz said. It will be a challenge to get them
over to the south side, where they need to go through the security screening
process before they can access the NFL Experience area.

NFL
Experience is open to the public during the week leading up to the Super Bowl,
but fans holding tickets to the game get exclusive access to the space on
Sunday.

In
the two years that NFL Experience has been on-site, it has been a big help in
terms of evenly distributing crowds, Supovitz said. The attraction opens at 11
a.m., three hours before the stadium gates open at 2 p.m.

“We
have seen between 5,000 and 7,000 people waiting to get into the Experience,
which makes life much easier for everyone,” Supovitz said. “They have already
cleared security, had their tickets scanned and gone through the patdowns and
magnetometers.”

The host site has an enormous footprint to
allow
for a security perimeter and support events.

Raymond
James Stadium, regular-season home of the Buccaneers, is unique among Super
Bowl host stadiums because it contains landings in its four corner ramps that
are perfect for supporting 25 temporary booths for international media outlets
broadcasting the game. Those flexible areas effectively minimize the number of
seats that the NFL “kills” for the Super Bowl due to obstructed views. In a
typical year, 1,700 to 2,000 seats are killed for the game. This year, the
number will be in the range of 1,400, Anderson said.

The
NFL requires a Super Bowl facility to have 70,000 saleable seats, including
suites, and with Raymond James’ capacity of 65,857, it’s the job of Anderson
and his staff of 60 to fill every nook and cranny with portable chairs to meet
that benchmark. All told, officials say Super Bowl capacity in Tampa should be
about 72,000.

About
6,300 temporary seats will be set up in the end zone plazas, including the
north end, where NBC is establishing its game-day set on the pirate ship, the
facility’s most recognizable design element.

To
make room for more seats in that end, officials have to tear down part of the
Caribbean-themed port town structure on the concourse behind the ship, Supovitz
said. It will be rebuilt after the game is over.

Elsewhere
in the stadium, it’s a matter of tucking about 1,000 additional seats into
various crevices around the building. “There are always some little seams and
cross aisles we can make use of,” Anderson said.

When
the AFC and NFC champions meet in Tampa on Sunday, their berths in the game
will be a mere two weeks old, but each organization’s front office has been
planning toward the appearance for far longer.

Not
that much was said about it.

“Everybody
knows you have to do it. You just don’t want to talk about it,” said Gary
Wright, former Seattle Seahawks vice president of administration. “Whether it’s
being superstitious or whatever it is, it’s important that people concentrate
on the job of getting to the game, and let us worry about what’s going to
happen once we get there.”

Wright
is not alone. Early preparations for a Super Bowl trip have become the rule
rather than the exception for NFL teams, with much of it done undercover.

One
executive admitted to traveling incognito to a Super Bowl host city in November
to scout out the town, even telling hotel officials he was thinking about
holding a convention there. Wright said he did a Super Bowl dry run one year
when the Seahawks spent a long week in Jacksonville between regular-season
games, taking advantage of the opportunity to set up an auxiliary training
room, an equipment room and offices at the hotel.

Well before players touch down, or even
win
their way into the Super Bowl, team
executives
and travel agencies start
working out details of the trip.

All
this team-level work serves to complement an organizational system that begins
with the league. The playoffs are a league-led venture, and with the Super Bowl
being the crown jewel, the NFL directly takes care of many aspects of the Super
Bowl trip for the teams.

The
league provides hotels for the players and front-office personnel of both
teams, as well as friends and families. The NFL also reserves all necessary
facilities for each team, including practice space, weight rooms, meeting rooms
and makeshift offices. The league even works with the teams for their postgame
parties, hospitality areas and suites.

It’s
Frank Supovitz, senior vice president of events for the NFL, who ensures that
all teams are fully prepared for the game logistically.

“We
try to minimize the distractions for the clubs so they’re able to focus on what
they are there for, which is a business trip and the playing of the game,”
Supovitz said.

Ahead of Week 17 of the
regular season, the league holds a conference call with all teams that are
still eligible for the playoffs, going over every aspect of the experience.
Teams gain access to an intranet site containing details on the league’s
contributions toward everything from hotel rooms to rings. The NFL also
provides teams with a manifest of all tickets that will be in their allocation
— generally about 17.5 percent of the available tickets in the stadium for each
team — allowing teams to have a database of all the ticket locations so they
can work ahead and begin planning for distribution both within the organization
and to their sponsors.

Once
the conference championship games are set, the next level of planning begins.

The
league invites representatives of the four remaining teams to the Super Bowl
host city, where Supovitz leads the teams through tours of the game venue,
practice facilities, hotels, meeting rooms and even bus routes. Supovitz and
his crew also provide a comprehensive guide outlining rental cars, hotel rooms,
meal functions, tickets, parties, hospitality and suites.

And
when the Super Bowl matchup is set, the league meets the teams at the airport
when they arrive in the host city and provides at least two staffers to assist
with any needs throughout their time there. The NFL staffers aiding the teams
report to Bill McConnell, director of event operations for the league, who
oversees every aspect of the team experience during their stay, from hotel
rooms to locker rooms.

Representatives
of several recent Super Bowl teams praised the NFL’s involvement in the
planning process, acknowledging the league’s vast experience in both running
the Super Bowl and observing teams’ preparations for the game, but they
stressed the importance of the team-level work, as well.

The staff of the Patriots put in 20-hour
workdays getting ready for Super Bowl
XXXVI, but the experience paid off
when the team planned subsequent
trips to the big game.

Lou
Imbriano, who led the planning for the New England Patriots ahead of their
Super Bowl appearances in 2002, 2004 and 2005, said the league-hosted meeting
ahead of the championship games is far too late to begin preparing.

“If
that’s their starting point, they’re way behind the eight ball,” Imbriano said.
“There’s no way you can plan for what happens in that week, in the three weeks
before an event. As much as the NFL does, if you’re going to take it to the
next level, your group has to be prepared. They have to have assignments.”

Former
Seahawks executive Wright, who led the planning process for Seattle’s Super
Bowl trip in 2006, echoed the need for advanced planning.

“Once
you realize you’re going to go into the playoffs,” he said, “then you have to
start.”

Beyond
planning for their own personnel, friends and families, some teams prepare
options for fans traveling to the Super Bowl.

The
Chicago Bears, for example, prepared a packaged travel deal for fans including
tickets, airfare and accommodations ahead of their appearance in Super Bowl XLI
in 2007. As soon as the team defeated New Orleans in the NFC championship game,
the Bears launched a site for fans to purchase the travel plan.

Similarly,
Imbriano said the Patriots put together trips packaging airfare and parties
featuring the Black Eyed Peas and Lionel Richie, among other acts. Imbriano,
who now serves as president and chief executive of TrinityOne Worldwide, recommended
that teams hire an outside company to handle much of the burden, though the
Patriots handled their preparations in-house during his tenure as vice
president and chief marketing officer.

Imbriano
left the Patriots in 2006 to start TrinityOne, a sports and entertainment
marketing firm out of Boston, after working with the team since 1997.

Ahead
of Super Bowl XLI, the Bears started fielding calls in mid-December from travel
companies interested in leading their planning efforts, according to Chris
Hibbs, senior director of corporate sales and marketing for the team. After the
team advanced to the Super Bowl, PrimeSport, the company they selected, arrived
at Bears headquarters early the next morning and essentially served as a travel
agent for everybody from players to VIPs to ownership. The company also led the
team’s fan travel efforts.

“The
travel relationship is probably the biggest one, because if you choose the
right company, and there are only a few of them who do it well and do it
traditionally year after year with NFL teams, they handle so much of the truly
tough planning,” Hibbs said.

The
Seahawks, who boasted several executives who had gained Super Bowl experience
with other teams, did not enlist the help of an outside company. But Wright,
who gained firsthand experience assisting the NFL for more than 20 Super Bowls
in the media center while with Seattle, admitted he might have sought outside
help if the team had not had so many experienced personnel.

“Experience
is absolutely tremendous,” said Wright, who left the team in March and now
works with Seattle’s MLS expansion Sounders FC as senior vice president of
business operations. “It helps so, so much. If you haven’t been in it and been
part of it, you think you know what it’s about, but that game is huge, and
there are so many aspects to it.”

Imbriano
said previous experience is invaluable, something he learned from the first of
the Patriots’ three-in-four-years Super Bowl trips, Super Bowl XXXVI in New
Orleans.

“I
lived through New Orleans, and there was no way I was going to live that life
again, because we were working 20 hours a day, sleeping four, and we were
scrambling,” he said. “As well as I think we did, there were a lot of things
that fell through the cracks. The Super Bowl is big, so you have to be in line
with that in the way you handle yourself and the way you operate.”

While
the logistics are clearly different from year to year with new cities and
venues, Wright stressed the importance of developing a plan and applying that
blueprint to each individual experience.

Every Super Bowl has its wrinkles, such as
Jacksonville’s use of cruise ships for housing.

“You
can’t just say, ‘Well, we’re going to do it exactly the same way as we did in
Detroit.’ You have to be able to adjust,” he said. “But if you have a plan, you
have to believe in your plan, stick with your plan — and be able to adjust on
the fly.”

Imbriano
recalled the league using cruise ships to house people for Super Bowl XXXIX in
Jacksonville.

“[There
is] always a new wrinkle no matter what city you go to,” he said.

But
with owners and coaching staffs being the superstitious type, marketing and
event officials find themselves conducting their advanced planning under the
table lest they provide bulletin-board material for an upcoming opponent.

“Ownership
and the football operations and the coach would’ve had a conniption,” said
Imbriano of the extent of his early planning for the Super Bowl.

He
added that while the players and staff can, and should, focus on winning a
game, he and his colleagues have their own business to do.

“It’s
the fiduciary responsibility of someone running marketing to understand what
needs to be done … in order to generate revenue for your team when you go to a
Super Bowl,” he said.

Hibbs
similarly said the Bears parlayed the game into future business successes by
reigniting the Chicago fan base.

“From
that respect, it was a big boon to our front-office business,” he said. “But
certainly the priority for everybody in the organization was, ‘Let’s make this
about winning a football game.’”

Wright
also noted the off-the-field goals compared with what happens once the game
itself begins.

“Everybody
that does the planning and everything else, those things are all important,” he
said. “But the important thing is winning.”

A representative of the
NFL has flipped a coin 42 times before the start of the Super Bowl, and 22
times it has come up tails. Based on that statistic, gamblers will lay down
millions of dollars this week that Sunday’s coin toss will be heads.

Proposition bets have grown so popular that
money is even wagered on the outcome
of the opening coin toss.

“It seems kind of crazy
that people would bet on that,” said Richard Gardner, manager of the online
sports book at Bodog. “That just reflects how it goes for the Super Bowl. You
can bet on anything.”

Gambling historians trace
the popularity of so-called proposition bets to Super Bowl XX, when Chicago
rookie defensive tackle William “Refrigerator” Perry pounded the ball and his
300-plus-pound frame into the end zone. Prompted by the pregame assertion of
Bears coach Mike Ditka that Perry would not run the ball, casinos posted 20-1
odds that the Fridge would score, attracting so much action that they
eventually had to move the line closer to even money.

Casinos lost big that
day, and gamblers’ interest in prop bets exploded.

Over the last two
decades, prop betting has become just as popular as betting on the Super Bowl
winner. Side bets can account for up to 10 percent of the daily handle at
Bodog, but that can swell to 50 percent or more of all bets made on the Super
Bowl.

Every element of the event, even the length
of the national anthem, draws bets.

“Each year, the menu
seems to expand based on demand from our guests and wagering public,” said
Jason McCormick, director of race and sports at Red Rock’s casino in Las Vegas.
His casino had nine pages of prop bets for last year’s game. “They’re looking
for action on every play.”

Las Vegas casinos, which
are regulated by a gaming commission and therefore cannot offer lines on bets
that are easily influenced, feature competition-based props, like guessing the
Super Bowl MVP, first player to score a touchdown or which team will score
last. They also offer bettors the chance to parlay statistics and results of an
NBA game on Super Bowl Sunday with the football game.

“We’ll probably do something
with
LeBron James and his total points and assists with a player that’s in the
football game,” McCormick said.

The wackier wagers are
usually found online, where sports books are not regulated as strictly as Las
Vegas casinos, so they can offer dozens of other bets, like guessing the
newspaper headline in the winning market, or whether or not a streaker will
sprint across the field.

What you won’t find in Vegas

Prop bets get crazier each year, so why not add a few
sports business bets to the growing list? Here are a few we’d like to see among
this year’s wagers.

Combined number of financial and automotive
company ads on the NBC telecast

Over/Under: 4

Supovitz

Midway through the second quarter, NFL events head Frank Supovitz
will have a faster heart rate than either starting
quarterback

Money line: Even

Super Bowl advertiser whose stock will see
the largest increase in value on Feb. 2, the day after the game

Bodog offered nearly 300
such props for the 2008 game and expects to have more this year. BetOnline.com
offered more than 500 scenarios last year.

In recent years, online
sports books have allowed gamblers to bet the over/under on the number of times
announcers would mention Peyton Manning even when he wasn’t playing in the
game, what color Gatorade would be dumped on the winning coach, or what songs
would be performed at halftime.

Care to wager the
over/under on the length of national anthem, to be sung by Jennifer Hudson this
year? Prognosticators were certain Billy Joel would take longer than the 1:44
line set before Super Bowl XLI, but he defied the odds and sang one of the
faster renditions in Super Bowl history at 1:30.

Which Super Bowl
commercial will have a higher rating on USA Today’s annual Ad Meter? Pepsi
ruled the 1990s, but Anheuser-Busch products have won the last 10 years. Stay
away from movie trailers.

The ability to craft
outlandish prop bets becomes even more impressive when one considers that many
wagers are not set until after the Super Bowl participants are determined two
weeks before the big game.

Shortly before last
year’s game, Red Rock created a Brother vs. Brother bet, pitting the Super Bowl
quarterbacking stats of Giants quarterback Eli Manning with those of
Indianapolis QB Peyton Manning from the previous year.

Not all of the prop bets
are pulled together at the last minute, though. The people at Bodog are already
looking forward to the Cowboys’ return to the Super Bowl, especially if Tony
Romo and his celebrity girlfriend are still around.